University College London

University College London

UCL is a world-class university, we aspire to have an environmental track record to match. For a research intensive university with a historic estate, this is a challenging goal. However, we are taking steps towards this by: addressing the environmental impact of our operations; providing ethical leadership through our decisions and actions; and deploying our academic excellence, research and entrepreneurial activities to solve real-world challenges. Understanding where we currently use resources is one of the first steps to reducing our consumption - we hope that everyone in the UCL community will help to achieve this vision.

Our energy use

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Study our data

University College London shares its sustainability data so that everybody
can help to identify new savings and suggest improvements. The
icons below show the utility data currently available for each year.

If you have ideas on how University College London could
use energy more efficiently, please let us know!

2017

University College London 2017 Electricity half-hourly data is generated
Daily.
It was first created at
30 Jan 2017, 10:42 a.m.,
last updated at
and has a maximum extent of
1 year.

We’ve had many requests for information and tools to help you make your departments more sustainable. Our new CarbonCulture pages will provide all the data you need and fun activities too. Sign in with your ucl.ac.uk email to see more!

Recent Blog posts

We’ve had many requests for information and tools to help you make your departments more sustainable. Our new CarbonCulture pages will provide all the data you need and fun activities too. Sign in with your ucl.ac.uk email to see more!…

Notes about University College London

Notes about University College London

Have these data been validated?

UCL is currently testing these pages prior to launch. Until this is complete, please note that some energy data may not be accurate.
The district heat network supplies a subset of buildings. Some district heat and electricity meters are being worked on on-site, so are not currently included in CarbonCulture visualisations. Gas data will be added in 2015.
Please contact the UCL Sustainability Team if you’d like to find out more.

How do you calculate the CO2e emissions from a unit of energy used?

Energy retailers and the government produce conversion factors that describe the typical carbon impact of different energy sources. These allow us to take the energy uses (in their respective units), and calculate the approximate carbon dioxide emissions, normally measured in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents (kgCO2e). Defra's UK conversion factors may be found at Defra's 2015 Guidelines.
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What do the colours on the graph mean?

For buildings, the colours in the graph show approximately how the current level of usage would lead to a given Operational Rating – as set out on a Display Energy Certificate (DEC) – if the performance for a given moment carried on for an entire year. This goes from dark green for ‘A’ to red for ‘G’. We calibrate this using input data used for generating the building’s DEC, together with information relating to 'normal' buildings of its type. If we do not have data for all of the utilities noted in the DEC then the graph will appear in a light-blue colour scale, to indicate that the usage displayed on the graph is not representative of the full energy use of this building. Graphs for communities also show in this blue colour scale.

How do you get these data from the buildings?

Energy data is delivered to CarbonCulture's server daily or monthly by UCL's own energy data system. This, in turn picks up energy data from the various meters located at UCL’s buildings. Some meters are manually read and the data are manually entered. The electricity data on this page are summed from a combination of half-hourly automated meter readings and monthly manually-read meter readings. Monthly usage from manually-read meters is averaged over the month. Gaps in manually-read meter data can arise due to delayed meter readings.

Why are you using these units and what do they mean?

We provide three different measures of the energy used: the amount of energy, its monetary cost, and the carbon impact of the energy used.
Energy use is measured in kilowatt hours (kWh), which are the standard units of a home energy bill (1kWh is the amount of electricity used by ten 100W light bulbs in one hour).
For electricity this number represents the amount of energy that flows into a building through the meter, and excludes distribution losses. For gas it is the amount of energy that is theoretically available by burning all the gas in an imaginary ideal burner. For district heating it reflects a flow of temperature into the building over time (after the heat produced by burning the fuel has been transported to the meter, which involves other losses). So each of these numbers, while all being measured in kWh, mean very different things. This is one reason that we prefer to use 'units per hour' when combining them. In some ways it would be more correct not to combine them at all, because combining them implies that the measures are comparable. This is a global challenge though, and conventions have become established around combining kWh. So we'll have to fix that another day.
Monetary cost is calculated using the costs per 'unit' for each utility in every building. The figures used are noted below in the Notes section.
The carbon impact is measured in kg of CO2e (the e stands for equivalent) which takes other climate-affecting gasses into account in addition to carbon dioxide.

Why isn't the graph updating?

Occasionally the data connection goes down and the graph isn't automatically updated with the current information. This is nothing to worry about. During these periods, all of the data is saved and we will fill in the graphs with the backdated information as soon as possible.